Abstract The trope of the broken slave family emerges in the pages of antislavery newspapers in the early 1830s, figuring all that is wrong with slavery in terms of slavery’s distance from an idealized domestic family form. In the ensuing years, antislavery media aggressively overrepresented enslaved social relations in terms of those that congeal into what we now call heterosexuality, thereby projecting a norm powerful enough that some of its non-enslaved and even white audiences began to fashion themselves in its image. Drawing examples from Sarah Forten, William Lloyd Garrison, and Sarah Grimké, this essay surveys the initiation and rhetorical construction of what would become a significant antislavery trope, the media platform through which a public could develop such a trope, and the reifications of the trope that assumed a life beyond the printed page. It concludes that antislavery media might be understood as a historically significant part of what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have called “the project of normalization that has made heterosexuality hegemonic.”
Jordan Alexander Stein (Thu,) studied this question.